Monday, May 19, 2008

This booklet is for my stepmother. My father and her invited my husband and me to a very expensive hotel. We stayed for four days and celebrated my father's birthday. I collected everything I could lay my hands on and made this booklet which includes photos, cutouts from the hotel's advertising folder as well as the daily menu and my guest card for instance. At the back I sewed our buttons into a small see through bag. I really hope she will like it.

Saturday, May 17, 2008

A commissioned wallhanging is finally reaching its completion. I had the measurements and the preferred color green to work with. Starting with several sketches I worked by auditioning my fabric. Later I freecut the fabric and translated the sketch into a quilt. Everything was done by raw applique and then quilted. As is often the case I discovered a fabric in my stash that worked much better than the ones I had bought for the foreground. So I discarded the precut shapes and just added this fabric which has a kind of watercolor appearance. Now there remains the border to quilt and then it will be finished. I am quite pleased by the outcome, especially since I have been procrastinating several weeks before finally starting to work on this piece.

Monday, May 12, 2008

One of our loosening up experiments was the felting of a pincushion. Looks like an UFO, doesn't it? Plus we made these small pins with shrinking plastic. That was fun!Later we tried to achieve a somewhat trapunto effect by quilting a piece of "fabric" made by felting rovings, fabric and other stuff together.At last Sara had a challenge for us. We had to randomly chose five words from a book and make a piece using these. Mine were the words location, glass, hall, staircase and girls. This really forced us to work outside our comfort zone.

Wednesday, May 07, 2008

So this is what it looks like when you have a workshop with 12 women wildly experimenting with the embellisher.... and when you have a host who supplies you with all imaginable things you might need for these experiments. It does not matter how many boxes of supplies you carry with you - there will always be something you left behind because you thought it would not be necessary. This item will be needed most of all, I assure you. No need to worry, we could buy everything, and of the best quality, too. Wools and rovings and silk carrier rods and silk throwster waste and yarns, these hand colored yarns!! No need to say that every one of us later took off with quite a lot more or heavier boxes than we arrived with. I wonder how I will keep the family nourished this month....

Sunday, May 04, 2008

This brooch was the first thing I finished during my workshop with Sara Lechner. This and a small pincushion were sort of a warming up exercise to get our embellisher going. We even made some pins with flower heads (from shrink plastic) which I think are quite charming.The next posts will give you an impression of the workshop which was very informative and quite exhausting!

Friday, May 02, 2008

Yesterday I attended a class to make Nuno-felt. We had a lot of fun and I came home with a selection of 6 felted pieces. It is quite interesting to realize how the kind of wool as well as the underground fabric influences the outcome of the felted piece. Since I am going to make a felted jacket in autumn I gladly accepted the opportunity to test various backgrounds - I decided on a striped silk fabric for my jacket, since this was the fabric which felted best.

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van Balzer

About Me

I am a textile artist creating mainly art quilts and dabbling in mixed media technique.
Besides I am mother of three adorable grown up kids and happily married to a mathematician. My Chinese sign of the zodiac is the dragon, hence the name dragonquilts for this blog.